Biz & IT —

Inside the second: Gaming performance with today’s CPUs

Does the processor you choose still matter?

Battlefield 3

As with Crysis 2, our BF3 test sessions were 60-seconds long to keep them easily repeatable. We tested at BF3's high-quality presets, again at 1920x1080.

Yikes. Here's an example where the commonly held belief about PC games and CPU performance looks to be correct. None of the processors appear to struggle much at all in delivering nice, low frame times throughout the test run.

Wow. Every processor down to the A8-3850 delivers 99% of all frames in 16.7 milliseconds or less. That adds up to a nearly uninterrupted stream of frames at 60 FPS.

Yes, we can still discern fine-grained differences between the CPUs with a really tight threshold, but there's really very little "badness" to be sifted out. Also, in a ray of light for AMD, the FX-8150 performs relatively well here. This is one of those cases, though, when nearly any modern CPU will do.